Leaving a peanut so that someone might break the shell to the nut inside.

Integrated Identity

Writer, comic, poet, entrepreneur, essayist, improvisor, actor, and lawyer: these are the threads of an integrated life whose design is Francis Xavier Pray, born as no other, given a strange and wonderful name, and most unlikely to be at all, nearly aborted, and born to old parents at the cusp of fertility. I am so different from my parents that it is hard to imagine how I came into the world. I feel at my current age, looking back, I was put into this world, shaped to a purpose, and sent forth upon a prayer. My time here is to play out the design given to me for the glory of God. That too is your commission: to know yourself, to value your uniqueness, and to express it as it was intended to be from before the time of your conception.

I just completed my first “warm up” performance as a stand-up comic before a sold out house at a community theater. Was this someone other than “me”? Of course not. All of me was there, fully present, and able, like an accomplished dancer, to change the substance, style and rhythm of my gift to the world “on a dime.” I could have as quickly and readily given a closing argument on arcane points of law if transported into a court room in the middle of my comedy act. This is the wonder and glory of being human. We are each called to be fully alive to our potentials, and to be of one essential harmonious identity in it all.

Roscoe Expertly Removing the Shell

Rewards Come To Those Hungry for What’s Within

Listen and See: The Divine Symphony

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence . . . "
- George Eliot, Middlemarch